Documentary editing is one of the most labor-intensive fields of historical work and one of the most important. Documentary editions, such as The Papers of Thomas Jefferson and The Papers of George Washington, are the foundation of scholarly work. Documentary editors find manuscripts in the archives and prepare them for publication by transcribing and describing every mark on the page and annotating the contents to make them more accessible to readers. It requires deep historical knowledge, patience, creativity, the ability to find a grain of sand out of place in a desert, and a high tolerance for delayed (and sometimes denied!) gratification. For a variety of reasons, Dickinson's manuscripts are particularly difficult to work with: He was one of the best-trained and highly educated lawyers in the British American colonies, and his writings contain frequent historical and literary references, legal terminology, and obscure individuals. In addition to the usual archaisms found in eighteenth-century writing, such as the long s (as in Pennſylvania), Dickinson edited his manuscripts extensively, as can be observed in the sample document below. He made many deletions and insertions, and he frequently wrote in his own idiosyncratic shorthand, sometimes with archaic letters, such as ⅌, called a "per-sign," which stands in for per, pre, pro, pri, or præ. Thus, when Dickinson wrote ⅌⅌, he meant "proper."  

 

"Draft Transcript of Closing Arguments for the Smith Libel Trial, [January 21, 1758],"  1:232-68.